Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli”. I’m here today with Professor Maria Truglio, who teaches Italian literature, Women and Gender Studies at Penn State University in the US, Maria wrote a wonderful book on Pascoli called Beyond the Family Romance. The Legend of Pascoli, in which she explores Pascoli’s poetry from a psychoanalytical perspective.Today we will talk about Anticlos, a poem narrating the last night of the Trojan war.You can listen to the poem in the translation published by Italica Press. The poem is read by David Carter, the music is by Giovanni Tardini played at the Celtic Harp by Arianna Mornico.

ELENA

Thank you Maria for being here today.

MARIA

Thank you so much, Elena. I really just want to say it's a true joy to be able to chat about this poem with you, and also to thank you, not only for this invitation for today, but also for your beautiful volume and for bringing this amazing collection into the English- speaking world. Thank you

ELENA

Ah, thank you, that’s lovely to hear. I’d like to start this episode by quoting a modern book: Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy. I this novel Barker tells us of the fate of the Trojan women who were made captive by the Greeks after the war on Troy ended. In Chapter 5, Helen of Troy recounts one episode of the last night of Troy, when the Greek soldiers were inside the wooden horse, ready to sack the city. “I walked all the way round it, singing Greek songs” says Helen. “Love songs” says another character, but even those who did remember her singing could never agree on the song. It was as if every man had heard the song that meant most to him” When I read these lines in Barker’s book I was quite surprised, because as far as I know, this particular episode is not very well represented in modern retellings of this story- - the only other source where this particular episode – is found is Pascoli’s poem Anticlos. This poem takes the reader to a point in the story of the Trojan war that is not narrated in the Iliad. The Iliad ends with Achilles returning Hector’s body to Priam, but Homer – or the author of the Iliad, does not narrate the last night of the war, when the Greeks enter Troy thanks to the stratagem of the wooden horse. A wooden horse is built and filled with soldiers, while the Greek army pretends to leave. The Trojans think the horse is an offering to the gods and they take it into the city walls. Night falls, the Greek soldiers are inside the horse waiting for a good moment to exit and sack the city, while the enemy is asleep and defenceless. At that point, they hear a woman’s voice singing: It’s Helen, singing in a way that to each man sounds like their own wife or loved one, to lure the soldiers into coming out of the wooden horse. The first stanza of Pascoli’s poem is a ring composition, starting and ending with Helen’s voice. Let’s hear it.

ELENA

Maria how do you interpret Helen’s voice?

MARIA

Oh yeah, Elena. I mean, it's such a compelling and I guess, multifaceted sort of moment here that Pascoli picks up on. I also just want to mention quickly, in talking about modern renditions of this scene, Pascoli also wrote about this moment in Latin, right in in one of his many Latin compositions. So he's definitely thinking a lot about it. So for me, at this moment, Helen's voice is, is sort of a representative of the idea of pure presence, right? Pure presence or plenitude. But also, as we go on in the poem, it is necessarily in in this sort of philosophic economy, let's say for Pascoli, it's also death, right? So it's both pure presence and death. And it's really such an intriguing moment in the poem, right? First of all, we're never told what she says, right? What is the semantic value of her words? What is she singing about? We don't know. Rather, it's the actually, the airy or the heavenly voice in and of itself, that has literally the power to move right, the power to move the hidden soldiers. Second, it's a bit ambiguous in in Pascoli’s poem, I think if Helen is, you know, walking around the horse and changing her voice to imitate each of the wives or each of the loved ones one by one, or rather, and the second option is the one to me that I think is more likely and more interesting, whether she is speaking in a single voice that each soldier simultaneously hears as the voice of his beloved. So this second possibility would mean that Helen's voice, it's sort of like the white light of the sun that encompasses within itself, all of the colours, right, all the colours of the rainbow, as it were, and then that white light, right? I should be careful when I'm using scientific metaphors, since that is not but, you know, based, based on a very elementary understanding of science, right? So then that white light, then is is is perceived by each soldier in the specific color, right, or tone that belongs to his wife. So it's certainly an imperfect metaphor, but I think it gets at this idea of presence and wholeness and fullness that I think Helen's voice represents, and we can note too, right, that at the sound of Helen's voice, each far off, unreachable woman suddenly appears, is suddenly there, right? Those are the that's the language Pascoli is using. Pascoli doesn't say that each soldier remembers his wife or thinks about his wife, but that, in fact, she is conjured into presence by Helen's voice. And, you know, just again to look closely at the at the language that Pascoli uses. To me, it's really interesting his use of the verb empire, which means to fill in this one line when he says. Se a lui la bocca non empia col pugno, right? So a very literal translation would be if he meaning Odysseus, if he had not filled antiques his mouth with his fist, right? To me, it's an intriguing verse, because Pascoli here is is following Homer's original text pretty closely, but he chooses a different verb here in Homer, and a shout out to my son, who was a classics major and helped me out with this right in Homer, the Greek verb here would more literally, be translated by the Italian primary, to press, to squeeze, to press tight. But Pascoli changes this verb to use the verb for to fill empiric so I think we see here the ambivalence of filling up the void, right? He wants to, like filling the empty mouth with a fist. And this is another change that Pascoli makes to Homer, right? Homer talks about Odysseus, his hand. Pascoli says fist, which, to me, is a more violent image, right? So we're already starting to see, well, this desire, the desire that you talk about in your book, for fill, fullness and presence and wholeness, is really strong. It also right, has this potentially violent undertone, right? And I think as we go through and as we'll I think keep discussing becomes also linked to a drive towards death.

ELENAThat’s very interesting, Maria, thank you very much. As you know, I’ve thought long and hard about this poem. For me, this poem is really about desire. The voice of Helen, precisely because it is separated from her body, comes to represent the true object of the soldiers’ desire, the bodies of their wives. So they almost act upon their desire, which is strong, after 10 years of being apart, and Helen almost succeeds in luring them out of the horse. Helen’s voice is like an empty signifier that each soldier fills with their own fantasies. On the other hand, we know Helen is a byword for desire, as she is “the face who launched a thousand ships”, as Christopher Marlowe famously wrote. Maria, you wrote about the notion of simulacrum when it comes to Helen vis a vis the wives. Can you tell us about it?

MARIA

Yes, for sure, and I really love that formulation you just offered there, the empty signifier right that the soldiers can fill in. We don't really get a very in-depth or detailed description. Should I mention? We don't know what she says, but we don't get a very in-depth description of the specific quality of her voice either, right? We only hear that it's airy or heavenly. So I think that, you know, we as readers can become like the soldiers, sort of filling in or imagining our own sort of auditory image of that voice, that empty signifier, in terms of this sort of play of the simulacrum, I think, you know, Pascoli crafts the poem in a way that really prompts us to consider how the relationship between Helen. On the one hand and all the individual wives on the other hand, sort of flips from our first impression. So initially it seems that Helen is imitating the wives’ voices somehow right, that she is copying right? She is the copy of their original voices and of them, but by the end of the poem and, and, you know, I know we'll come to that later. I think we're sort of pushed to reconsider that relationship as as the opposite, right? Namely, that each wife ultimately is the pale, or the partial simulacrum of the original ideal that Helen represents. So I will say, as a feminist, I'm not really in love with that idea, right? It's..wait a minute here, because it does seem to suggest that real women are all imperfect copies of some ideal prototype of of woman, right, of the perfect woman. But I think that this is how Helen is functioning for Pascoli, as he's thinking through and poetically representing ideas about desire, right? And again, you know, to take it down to the the details of the poem, even on this sort of phonic level, right? We have this hypnotic repetition of sol una, sol una, throughout the poem, right? Only one, only one. Right, only one woman for each soldier. And then in the end, that becomes te sola, you alone. And we can see this flip here, even in the word order, only one, you only right. So Pascoli is creating a chiasmus here, right? A chiasmus, which is a criss crossing of the word order that I think shows us this flip, or this crisscrossing of sort of original and copy, where that that goes on over the course of the poem.

ELENA

Well, thank you, Maria, and right, I'm not in love with this either. That's how you're in this poem. In the next stanza we meet the protagonist, Anticlos. Who is Anticlos? He is not one of the great heroes in the Iliad, in fact he is only mentioned in two lines of the Odyssey (book IV, 277-279). He is the anti-hero, actually, at least in Pascoli’s poem, he cares nothing for glory or spoils, “he is a force but only because he is forced to be”. And when he hears Helen’s voice he suddenly thinks of his wife in a domestic and peaceful setting, his home. When I read this, I thought again about what Jacques Lacan says about desire, that our desire is triggered by the other person’s desirousness, in fact by their desire towards us. In other words, we desire someone also when we see that they desire us. In fact, in the lines we heard before we can almost see Anticlo’s wife coming towards him with a loving attitude. Maria, you have often looked at female figures in Pascoli, can you tell us about them. How does Pascoli represent femininity in Conviviali and elsewhere?

MARIA

Thanks, Elena. That's a great question, and a really big question, right, Pascoli was pretty prolific, so just speaking very broadly, if we go back to Pascoli’s famous essay in which he elaborates his theory of poetry, we remember this figure of the child, right? The function Elena, which is the title of that essay, encapsulates his thinking about poetics, right? So in a word, and, of course, I'm simplifying here, but in a word, the poet is the adult who allows the inner child understood in a very idealized way to speak and link to this notion of the poet as channeling a child-like vision of wonder Is the assertion that because children are pre erotic poetry, for Pascoli excludes the erotic, right? So in this way, Pascoli and and Freud, who I use a lot to understand Pascoli’s poetry, are quite antithetical, right? So Pascoli is embracing this idea of the child as pre erotic, pre sexual, innocent and pure. So this is a surprising thing to say when we think about the rich tradition of love poetry in Italy, right? That true poetry doesn't represent sexual or romantic love, because that's not part of the child's world. You know, I wonder if Petrarch might have something to say about that. But in fact, in most of Pascoli’s poetry, female figures are typically not objects of romantic or erotic desire, right? There's not a Laura figure or a Beatrice figure in Pascoli’s work typically, right? Instead, we primarily see figures that are sisterly or maternal, and often these females figures are connected in some way to death. Right? To bring us back to that theme. In fact, in one essay that I wrote about this poem, anti clo I put together with another poem called la voce from a different collection. I think it's Canti di Castelvecchio and... and it is right? the poem La Voce, which means the voice right, which is, of course, why I put these together. In La Voce Pascoli imagines his dead mother speaking to him, and in fact, calling his his, calling him by his nickname. And as a parentheses, I would say, I think what's so brilliant about Pascoli, or one of the things that's so brilliant about him and his work, is how he drew from his specific biographical experiences, especially the deaths of so many family members to create poetry that so beautifully and so hauntingly meditates on these broadly shared human experiences like desire and loss and mourning. So coming back specifically to the conviviali we encounter here a number of mother figures specifically, right? And many from the almost all from the classical world. So we meet Olympia, the mother of Alexandros, Livia, the mother of Tiberius, the mother of Narcissus. And then in the final column, the virgin mother, right? For me, these mothers suggest that the gesture of turning back to the classical world, which is really pascoli’s project here in the Conviviali, is a kind of reiteration, or re articulation of going back to childhood, right, going back to in infancy, to that primary relationship with the mother. And both of these gestures are driven by a kind of desire for something perceived to have been lost.

ELENA

Well, thank you, Maria , and I must say that Anticlos may be longing for peace and his home, but desire makes him violent, and once inside he burns and destroys, precisely because he is desperate to hear that voice again. During his night of violence, he himself is mortally wounded: on his deathbed, he asks to have Helen sing with the voice of his wife. Let’s hear the story.

Clearly there is something very powerful here at the root of Anticlos desire. At the root of each desire, each individual desire, there is something we all long for, that Lacan called jouissance. Maria, you discussed jouissance in relation to the women in Pascoli’s poems, who are always somehow at the threshold of life and death.

MARIA

And I think Calypso would be a really great example of this from the Conviviali, a different poem. She appears at the moment of Ulysses death, right as he's asking, Who am I? Who was I in the longest poem in the Conviviali, if I'm if I'm remembering correctly, so we have these figurations in which, on the one hand, a drive to overcome the limitations and the boundaries of the self seems to be fulfilled. But this also entails a certain kind of a shipwreck of the self, right, the dissolution of the individual. And Anticlos, specifically, passionately, I think, really cleverly and powerfully inscribes this sort of ambivalent drive into this one verse in which Odysseus tries to prevent anticos from responding to Helen, right. And then Italian: Elena. Elena, Elena, la morte infante, right, Helen. Helen, it's death child, right? And the word infante that Pascoli uses, you translate as fool, which I really love. It really captures, really effectively, this double edgedness of this desire, right? It's a fool's errand to run after Helen, right? In a more literal way. And I think this would have sounded somewhat odd in English to render it this way, but the infant day, right? Infant child carries that idea of return to childhood, a return to infancy that is connected to and drama. By all these mother figures, but etymologically, and certainly Pascoli was was super well aware of this. He's such a in spite of his claims of being childlike, he's super erudite, right? Yes, he is. Oh, my. Etymologically, this Infante signifies one who does not speak, right? One who is without language. So in the poem about voice and desire and and desire for presence, we have this one verse linking Helen directly to death and to silence, right? Um, so I kind of understand this in the in the framework of some of Freud's ideas, and specifically his essay on the uncanny. And as you know, in my work, I really see Pascoli’s poems as really profoundly uncanny in many ways. And in this essay, Freud describes infancy precisely as and here I quote the English translation “a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people.” So Pascoli, I think, gives us all these figurations of the drive to go back to that time, that ecstatic time when there was no separation between me and not me, but also the ways in which that fantasy can only be fulfilled through death, right through the dissolution of the self.

ELENA

Yes, so Right. Thank you, Maria, that was a very good exploration of of the women and the water the threshold of life and death. Thank you so much. And now we are down to the last stanza. And I say it's it's enigmatic, because after all of this, Anticlos is before Helen, and she's about to sing to him with the voice of his wife, but let's hear what happens.

ELENA

Maria, why do you think he chooses Helen?

MARIA

Oh, it's such a surprising and powerful ending. And you know, on a non critical personal level, I certainly hope my husband would not make such a choice. But I really love how the conclusion circles back, in some ways, to the beginning. Right? We start with Odysseus silencing anti close, and now anti close silences Helen. Then I think this, this dramatization, shows us that desire to be in the full presence of presence, right? And we can imagine anti close thinking, I don't want to summon my absent wife through imitation, but rather, I just want to be here and experience the absolute right. But that only comes at the moment and at the price of his death.

ELENA

Yes, I agree, and to me the end really tells us that desire per se is preferable to fulfilment. I’m reminded here of Schopenhauer’s theory that Pascoli knew well.. .That desire shifts from one object to the other, but it is never satisfied, it just keeps going, taking people from one goal to the next: we want, we strive, we obtain, and we grow bored.. Until the next desire appears. But what we have here is raw desire, Helen, the ultimate object desire. She who also seemed to desire nothing, as in the story we are never told about what she wants, she is just the trigger of the story. But Pat Barker in her book also makes Helen a weaver: weaving stories, as if the author wanted to give her some agency, some power over her actions.

I wanted to finish this episode and leave you to enjoy the full story with a quote from another modern book, again, to have a ring composition Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is very appropriate here: “I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.”

Thank you so much for being here, Maria

MARIA

Thank you. Thank you. I've really enjoyed our conversation